


No Matter What

by emjam



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, During Canon, Family, Family Feels, Ford Pines is a Good Brother, Insecurity, Memory Loss, Post-Weirdmageddon, Temporary Amnesia, Unconditional Love, fake ids, in this fic at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:08:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25779451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emjam/pseuds/emjam
Summary: Stan has regained most of his memory, except for that decade of time between New Jersey and Oregon that none of his family ever saw. With no one around to remind him of that time in his life, he was having trouble regaining those memories - but did he even want them back?
Relationships: Dipper Pines & Ford Pines & Mabel Pines & Stan Pines, Ford Pines & Stan Pines
Comments: 1
Kudos: 88





	No Matter What

Scrapbooks. Old home films. Stories, both tame and exciting. Family and friends that remember what it was like to be around one Stanley Pines. These were the things that had carried Stanley through the past week or so, handing him piece after tiny puzzle piece in an attempt to find the complete picture.

And still, when he woke up, it was with an empty skull and the terrifying ache of confusion. The ceiling was an unfamiliar color. The air smelled new.

“What – where am I?” A hand gently pushed into his shoulder from somewhere to his right, stopping him from getting up.

“Stanley, it’s me. It’s Stanford.”

“Ford?” Wait, _Ford?_ How was Ford here? Hold on – was Ford supposed to be gone for some reason? Something in the back of Stan’s brain told him that the silhouette of his brother was an anomaly. He squinted in its direction. It was washed out by the backing sunrise coming in through the blinds. Was that gray in Ford’s hair?

“Yes, it’s me. Do you know what year it is?”

“Uh, 19 – no, wait.” His head throbbed like it did when he got a migraine after a night in the basement. What had he been doing in the basement? “2000 – 2002?” He grunted. “Well, that’s not it.”

“Stanley.” When had Ford ever sounded so patient? “It is 2012. You’re having an amnesic spell. They’re common after you wake up. You’re in Gravity Falls, and you are safe.”

“Shit.” Something shifted, clunked into place. “What – ugh.” Another acute feeling of a spike pounding through his forehead, a head-splitting stab of pain, and then the unrest in his mind thankfully bled away. It was 2012, mid-August. Right.

When he sat up, without Ford stopping him this time, it was with his shirt sticking to his back. Another nameless, faceless nightmare last night. He wiped sweat off his forehead. “Thanks, Ford.”

“Of course.” Ford backed up and stood. “That was a quick return.”

“Getting better, huh?” A corner of Stan’s lips turned up. Slow, and sometimes painful, but things were coming back faster each time. He leaned over and pulled himself out of bed, brute-forcing his back into working order. He smacked away Ford’s offered hand. “Geez, I’m an amnesiac, not an invalid.”

“Ah, yes, God forbid you need help once in a while,” came Ford’s dry response, but he still smiled and followed Stan’s just-awoken grumpy stupor out of the room. “Breakfast is already ready downstairs. Unless that counts as help?”

“Hey, I’ll never say no to food waitin’ for me in the morning.”

The smell of eggs and bacon carried Stan to the kitchen table, where Dipper and Mabel were already digging in.

“Good morning, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel happily cheered, spewing egg all over her plate.

“Oh, hey, Mr. Pines!”

Okay, why the hell was Soos here?

“Why the hell are you here?” He found himself saying out loud.

Soos turned away from the sink, where he had been circling the bottom of an egg-stuck pan with a soapy sponge. “Just here to help, dude! I made the eggs and stuff, and that made a bit of a mess, so, heh, just cleaning up.”

Stan’s brain shorted. “Did – didn’t I tell you to go home last night?” Or was that a splinter of memory that he made up?

“He wouldn’t leave,” Dipper informed kind-heartedly, followed by a crunch of his toast.

“Thank you, Soos,” Ford said, stepping in to take over the dishes. “I can do the rest of these.”

“If you’re sure, dude.”

That nightmare bit at the heels of Stan’s consciousness. Was Stan suddenly incapable of doing the dishes himself the way he had been doing them for thirty years? Maybe even longer, if he could begin to remember that far. Their childhood was no mystery, but afterwards –

He wanted to shout at his family to stop, but stop what? Acting like he needed help? He dug his heels in and kept quiet.

Grumbling out a “thanks” – maybe he shouldn’t totally drive people away – Stan dropped into his chair and began to stuff his face. Maybe then his growling mind would settle down and stop urging him to snap at people.

After a quiet, inaudible conversation between Soos and Ford, Soos said his goodbyes to everyone at the table and slipped out to the porch, presumably to head home.

Swallowing hard, Stan pointed at The Scrapbook, which Mabel was keeping beside her on the table despite the fact that she eats food much like a wood chipper would. Miraculously, its well-decorated cover has managed to avoid her destructive path so far. “Why’ve you got that out, sweetie?”

“Oh!” Mabel thankfully didn’t have food in her mouth this time. “I figured we could take some more walks down memory lane after breakfast!”

“Huh. You sure?” He speared another piece of egg off the plate. “I don’t got any more blank spots.”

“Any more recent blank spots,” Ford corrected as he placed dishes in the drying rack.

“Any blank spots that matter,” Stan retorted.

“Stanley –”

Mabel’s grin became strained. “Um… I know that you have all _these_ memories back, but I thought that maybe going over it again might help you with the stuff that you’re missing.” She patted the fuzzy cover of the scrapbook in a way that was probably meant to be convincing. “It’s worth a try!”

“Yeah, well –” An unbidden fragment of last night’s dream filtered through the tangled web of the subconscious. Stan faltered. Wet boots, copper, claustrophobia, crushing darkness. “Well, _I_ think that maybe if I don’t have ‘em back yet, they’re not worth remembering,” he snapped. He regretted it the second he saw Mabel’s wilting smile. These kids always knew how to make him feel things other than anger. Hope. Gratitude. Other things he thought he had lost by the time they had disrupted the entire town with their summer vacation. “I - I didn’t mean to snap at you, sweetie. It’s not your fault.”

She frowned, which was worse than her trying smile. “I just wish the scrapbook could do anything else to help.”

“It’s alright. If it happens, it happens. And if not…” He shrugged. Based on the pained blurs that would return to Stan after a night of twisting and turning, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

“Stanley, maybe it will be best to give the scrapbook another shot. After all, it was ten years of your life.” Ford sat down at the table, his wild hair entering Stan’s vision. Stan turned to look at his brother. “I understand that some things are painful, but if I were you, I would still want to know about experiences that likely shaped me as a person.”

“Yeah, well. I’m not you.” It came out a bit too harshly. “If they didn’t shape me for the better, I’m fine forgettin’ about them.” He had the suspicious feeling that whatever happened in those ten years between New Jersey and Oregon didn’t create the type of “formative experiences” that he’d wanna keep.

“But -” Dipper started.

“Sorry, I can’t hear you, I’m too busy eating,” Stan interrupted, filling his mouth with too much eggs and bacon at once.

* * *

“Grunkle Stan?”

Stan blinked, and he was back in the gift shop. What happened?

“Grunkle Stan, it’s me. It’s Dipper.”

His eyes refocused. Oh. Dipper was there now. When had he gotten there?

“Are… are you okay?’

“Yeah, I just zoned out for a second there. Yeesh. What’s up?”

“Mabel and I were talking, and we came up with an idea, but… only if you’d want to do it.” Dipper seemed nervous in a way he recently hadn’t been, something that must’ve changed so gradually that Stan couldn’t pinpoint the moment that he seemed to have opened up and become a brave kid. Maybe if Stan had been braver, he could have –

Could have what?

What was he doing in the gift shop again? There were bobbleheads clutched tightly in his hands. Oh. He had been stocking.

Stan shook off the cobwebs. Damn spotty memory. “Depends. An idea for what?”

“Well… we found some stuff that we think you kept from the 1970s. From before. And if you want, we can show it to you. It might kickstart some memories.”

Before he could stop himself, his shoulders hunched. He was tensing like a coiled, angry snake. “Can you all just drop it already? If they’re not coming back, they’re not coming back. An’ maybe I wanna keep it that way. Life ain’t all sunshine and roses. I thought you three would understand that after the shi - chicanery we’ve been through.” His jaw ached like he had been grinding his teeth the night before. He probably had. “I said ‘chicanery’ there and never had any intention to say a different word.”

“I know, Grunkle Stan,” Dipper said mutely. “This summer… some of it was terrifying. Some of it even made me understand why McGucket started the Society.” His voice cracked a bit, and Stan was reminded that this boy was twelve. “Remembering can be awful.” He shrugged. “I don’t know, though. If someone handed me the memory gun right now… I’m not sure I would erase anything.”

Stanley drew back, regarding his nephew.

“The offer’s still open. Just let us know.”

Dipper left Stan alone in the gift shop with his thoughts.

* * *

Later, when Stanley shot up in the middle of the night from another out-of-context nightmare of fear and confusion, Ford was there. He had been waiting right outside. Stan could admonish him for doing something that didn’t need to be done. Instead, in the dark of the night he accepted Ford’s words of comfort as a balm against yet-uncovered memories that battered against the walls of his mind.

* * *

“I have reason to believe that your locked memories are at least partially to blame for your recent nightmares.”

“Huh?” Stan grunted, shoving cereal into his mouth. It was too early to be doing this.

Ford cleared his throat and sat across from Stanley. He had brought along a science-y-looking piece of paper, because of course he did. He placed this diagram in the middle of the table. It showed a drawing of the brain, sectioned off into labelled parts that Stan didn’t really understand.

“Obviously, your amnesia is not brought about by natural causes. Your memories have instead been blocked off manually using the memory gun.” He pointed to part of the brain diagram, where a wall had been drawn. “These blocks have been inserted into your mind. The brain is not designed to handle memory loss this way. It’s trying to break free, which manifests in your unpleasant and confusing dreams.”

Stan wiped some milk off his lower lip. “So how come it’s not free yet?”

Ford leaned over the drawing on the table. “You see, all of your regained memories were kick-started by a certain trigger. Your childhood memories began to come back when we looked at old photos. Your memories of this summer and the previous three decades did the same in response to stories told by the kids and your employees.” Picking up a pencil, Ford erased all the straight lines cutting through the brain except for one. “To free this compartment and therefore give your brain some rest,” he tapped the eraser against the paper, “you will have to accept exposure to a memory trigger.”

Stan’s eyes slid shut. He sighed. The spoon clattered into the bowl. “Ford, you know I don’t want to do this.”

“I know.” Ford gathered his notes with a soft look in his eye that Stan chose not to interpret as pity. “I don’t know what you went through in those missing years. No one does. I won’t claim to know how bad it was. But I know that no matter what you’re missing, it’s taking a toll on you, Stanley.”

“Don’t you think I know that?!”

Ford fell silent, clutching his pencil tightly.

This was making Stan crabby as all hell. He put his head in his hands. “I know it’s not really workin’ out. I can’t have these nightmares forever. I gotta get some good sleep sometime.” He stared at the leftover milk in the bowl. Waves rippled ever-so-slightly on its surface when he spoke. “But these nightmares… I don’t recognize myself.”

“You’re… not yourself in these nightmares?”

“No, I am. But I’m always running, or hurting, or hiding.” He blinked and tears threatened to fall. Just great. “Ford, what if I’m a bad person? What if I’m terrible and I just don’t know it?”

Warm arms wrapped around him, making him startle. When had Ford left his seat?

“Stanley.” Ford’s voice rumbled in his chest, sounding off since it came from above Stan’s head. “I did what I had to survive on the other side of the portal. You know that. I’ve told you some of those stories.”

“Yeah,” Stan mumbled, swallowing around the lump in his throat.

“Am _I_ a bad person?”

“Well, you do leave the seat up sometimes,” Stan cracked.

“Shut up, you knucklehead.” Ford let him go, resting his elbows on the table to meet Stan eye-to-eye. “Whatever you unlock with those memories, it won’t change our opinion of you. I will tell you right now that it might change _your_ opinion, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is how we feel, and I’ve already decided on that.”

“Really?”

“Really. I didn’t even hold a family meeting. This house is a monarchy.”

“More like a matriarchy.”

“Ha ha, I’m a woman, very funny. If nothing else, your humor is still stuck in that missing decade of yours.” He shoved Stan’s shoulder as Stan cackled.

“Maybe I’ll just have to see about that memory trigger so that my humor can finally be free.”

Ford raised an eyebrow. “So in this scenario, your humor is stuck in your brain behind a memory block specifically built to block out the 1970s? Remind me how that would work.”

“Sheesh, Sixer, sometimes a joke can just be a joke.”

“You know I’m just teasing you.” He smiled down at Stanley. “But… does that mean you agree to do it?”

Stan crossed his arms and bit the inside of his cheek. “Yeah. Yeah, Ford. Let’s do this.”

* * *

Well, even with all the memories from the 1980s onwards returned to him, Stan had forgotten about the jackalope (or was it antelabbit?) entrance to his hidden surveillance room. Or maybe he had just figured that everything in it had been destroyed. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, after all.

Dipper pulled out a box from what used to be the secret room in his office. The TVs had gotten smashed up in the whole apocalypse dealio, but one unassuming cardboard box somehow managed to survive, having been shoved under a table beside a particularly sturdy filing cabinet. He wiped off some leftover debris. “Well, this is it.”

“Let’s head out to the living room,” Ford offered. “It’ll be best for Stanley to be sitting in a safe place for this. Remember, we might open the floodgates for a decade of memories.”

Everyone holding their breath, the Pines family made its way out to the living room, where Stan took a seat in his chair and everyone settled around him.

“We found this before we knew what you had been doing in the basement,” Dipper explained, plopping the box down. He pulled out some newspaper clippings. “Eh, you already know about this stuff.”

Ford picked them up. “Grifter… Stan Pines dead.” Color drained from his face. “Can we… not keep these?”

“No way, they’re souvenirs, Sixer.” Stan waved his hand. “I just take ‘em as a reminder that I’m no longer a grifter or dead, how about that?”

“I suppose.” Ford set the clippings aside.

“Oh, here’s what we really wanted to show you! These have to have been made before you settled down in Gravity Falls, right?” Mabel said, diving her hands into the box and pulling out a stack of plastic cards. “Fake IDs.”

“Fake IDs?” Stan tried not to wince. Oh boy. He took a deep breath. Inhale, hold, exhale. “Alright, lemme at ‘em.”

“You’re sure, Grunkle Stan?”

“Yeah, yeah. Should probably do this sooner rather than later.” Before he could ever truly be ready, the stack of cards was in his hands. On top was one for Stetson Pinefield.

“There’s passports and stuff in here too,” she added, but Stan was entranced with what he already held.

“Stetson,” he whispered to himself. “Ha, that was my first go at it. Had no idea how to properly throw people off my trail. I had just put on some glasses and called it a day.”

“Stanley?” Ford tried. “Do you remember in which year you put together that alias?”

“Uh… well, maybe.” A rushing ache swam to the forefront of his mind, and he shook his head uselessly. “I… it was 1973. After…” Was it after the string of failed robberies, or after the massive credit card debt dug him a hole to die in? “I was in a bad place. Owed a lot in credit card debt,” he remembered, shuffling the memories into the proper order. “And then I cheated at poker and -” And then there were guns and some unfortunate fistfights. That was the first rock bottom that forced Stan to claim another name so that he could try again. But the kids didn’t need to hear the gritty details. If Ford really wanted to know, they could sit out on the porch long after the kids went off to bed. “Stetson Pinefield was born. I shed my identity like a slimy snake, would ya look at that?”

“You’re not slimy, you’re soft, like a marshmallow!”

Her words drew him out of the tunnel of memory. “Thanks, sweetie.” He ruffled her hair fondly, making her laugh. “I choose to take that as a compliment.”

“And you chose correct!”

“Does the passport fill any more gaps?” Dipper fished out Pinefield’s passport and passed it over. Some of the old pages were smeared with water damage, but Stan could still see all the international places Stetson had visited during his get-rich-quick schemes. Reading each city was like turning on a lightbulb in Stan’s head. London, Brazil, a few spots in Canada… every location came with a few sights and faces.

“Uh, yeah, that really did a lot, actually,” Stan struggled, closing his eyes for just a moment against the torrent. The ID card and passport didn’t just break down the barrier for that time in his life; it also softened the barriers for surrounding eras. Little things trickled in now, like bits and pieces of Stanley’s two-year stint in which he got himself banned from as many states as possible once the identity of Stetson Pinefield had fallen through. Like an unfortunate country-wide bar crawl. Losing access to most of the United States wasn’t on purpose, but Stan had really been pushing his luck in those years, racking up state bans faster than before or after.

Things went on like that for each ID, drawing out memories and connecting dots to other new pieces of information. Memory’s web filled out more with each addition. Some strings of the past turned out to be desperate and painful, but they were still strings of the web.

“Andrew ‘8-Ball’ Alcatraz?”

Ford snorted beside him at the name, despite everyone’s high emotions.

“Listen,” Stan laughed, “At this point I had really given up on the whole thing. I figured, hey, if they find me at this point, they find me. Might as well have fun with it.” His expression soured at his own sad, young face printed out on the card. A sick lurch rocked his stomach. Wet boots, copper, claustrophobia, crushing darkness. Recollection of the events was as subtle as a brick to the head. “This was near the end of it. ‘79. Right before I chewed my way out of the trunk of a car.” His eyes were wet, and his breath was short. Why was it so hard to breathe? Did the Shack suddenly have an air ventilation problem?

Hyperventilating. He was hyperventilating.

Vision was blurry. Chest was tight. He couldn’t see well, but he could feel two warm hands on his shoulders. Grounding.

“Stanley, it’s alright. Breathe with me, okay? In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. In…”

Despite the vice clamping down around Stan’s lungs, he followed the instructions, forcing air in and making himself hold it. Eventually he matched his brother.

“There you go. A few more times.”

When air finally flowed freely into Stanley’s lungs again, he put an arm on Ford and kept up shaky but whole breaths. He didn’t look up. “Sorry. I dunno what… I dunno.”

“It’s alright.” Ford patted his hand. “We can stop here for the night. I don’t think there was much left in that box anyways.”

Out of sight, Dipper dumped the armful of cards, passports, and papers into the box unceremoniously. Meanwhile, Mabel wrapped her small arms around Stan’s middle, sneaking into the chair even though it was technically a one-person seat. Stan definitely wasn’t about to stop her. He rested a tired arm on her back and pulled her close while Ford pulled out a DVD to watch. Mentally taxed and exhausted, he just watched while Ford put the DVD on.

At some point, Dipper had squirmed in on Stan’s other side. God only knew how. Ford took a seat on the dinosaur skull. The TV filled the darkening room with warm flickering hues. Some sort of 90s romance classic. No action or dramatics beyond professions of love, and Stanley was wholly fine with that.

His body sunk into his chair like a stone, especially with two small warm bodies snuggled up to him and his brother providing quiet commentary as the perfect background noise. It wasn’t long before he let his eyes slide shut, carried away by the soft voices coming out of the television.

They loved him. No matter what, they loved him.

He had no more nightmares that night.

**Author's Note:**

> look at me writing an amnesiac stan fic like it's 2016. I will always love these kinds of fics. ;__;
> 
> thank you for reading! <3


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